Monthly Archives: December 2017

In the previous two tips, we went over Step 1 – weeding the garden of bad or outdated habits, and really seeing into what an actual Strategy is, rather than just a bunch of Tactics thrown at the wall to see what sticks – and Step 2, which is a crucial building block of developing both Timing and Trust, in what you do on the air and in shaping the knack of pulling people closer to you.

Those are huge, and take some time to believe in, because there are plenty of people who THINK they’re coaches that actually know nothing about starting from scratch and creating an entity that has a real chance to get huge ratings.

Step 3 of my coaching process is the most fun, the longest lasting, and the most imaginative: It’s all about the Art – the “how high can you fly?” quest that all great talents have.

This is where coaching is most important. Michael Jordan had a coach. Phil Jackson took His Airness from just a great player to a Champion. Jack Nicholson has had the same dialogue coach for decades. Tom Brady without Bill Belichick would be Aaron Rogers – great stats, but only one championship, not five.

Here’s how Step 3 works: I strip every “crutch” away. Every little habit that doesn’t serve a purpose or wastes the listener’s time, every additional step that slows down a show’s momentum, every unnecessary word possible, every semi-lame bit you still cling to that’s just there because you haven’t come up with anything better. That leaves ONLY WHAT YOU DO BEST. And we work on making that sound so simple, so easy, that people just gravitate to it because it sounds like you’re having so much fun doing it.

After that “A” side, we work on a “B” side, just like an old vinyl record had, because one-trick ponies eventually lose their appeal.

There are people I’ve worked with for decades. Some have changed formats, some have gone into voice acting careers, some have become the big fish in a small pond, some have become a big fish in a huge pond, but they all have one thing in common: They’re still curious about getting better, seeing more, developing new techniques.

You CAN do it yourself, without a coach. But you can do it much faster WITH a coach. If you fear the coaching process, what you’re really doing is arbitrarily lowering your ceiling on how good you can get.

It’s easy to throw around big, well-known names that I’ve worked with, but there are literally hundreds of people I’ve coached that you’ve probably never heard of that are even more successful, but chose to remain in smaller markets and OWN them. Whichever path you choose, a coach’s job is to help you realize your dreams. If that’s not what’s happening, then you’ve got the wrong coach.

No coach is more talented than his players. But no great player got there by himself.

Last week, I let you in on the first step of my coaching process – which is primarily a “weeding the garden” period of stripping away outdated habits, and learning how Strategy is different from Tactics. (Tactics should grow out of the Strategy you’ve chosen for the station and for the show; not the other way around.)

The second step is where the real issues come to the surface: Developing Timing and Trust.

Both solo acts and team shows are all about timing. Stay with something too long, and you’re just another jock that can’t just shut up. Beating subjects into the ground, always searching for one more funny line, etc. just makes you the guest at the party who won’t leave. As Paul Simon wrote, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,” and I’m always amazed at how one or two phone calls will serve as the gauge by which a talent measures his image or performance.

But the vast majority of people never get a PPM device or fill out a diary. Just like going to a restaurant and getting poor service or subpar food, most people don’t take the time to comment to management or on Yelp; they just never go back to that restaurant. This is where Trust comes in. You have to choose what to stand for, what you will do and what you won’t do, and then develop the right timing in getting it on the air in a way that’s digestible.

This is where I work with people more as voice actors than disc jockeys or talk show hosts, because while “Content is King” is still quoted, the reality is that PERFORMANCE is King. Without performance ‘chops’, even the best and most relevant Content will fall flat. And while I do want you to stay top of mind, if you’re a great personality, people will listen, no matter what you do. There’s no one set mold for what makes a great air talent, but having a listenership that trusts you with their time every day is something the great ones have, and the ones that aren’t great yet don’t have.

While I help shape and coach the performance of “bits”, they’re not what you ARE, they’re just things you DO. The shows with my fingerprints on them are always “visit-driven”, not bit-driven. So the trust that we work on in the sessions with each other is very much the same as the level of trust you want from your listener.

A lot of air talents, especially in the Talk arena, think having great guests draws people to them, but that’s only a surface-level ingredient. Los Angeles great Phil Hendrie is proof: his “guests” are usually HIM (playing characters) and he’s absolutely riveting.

My buddy Mancow Muller in Chicago is another great example. He’s run the gamut from “shock jock” to Political commentary, radio to TV, author….and never missed a beat. Always interesting, always keeping things MOVING.

Wally, of The Wally Show on Contemporary Christian network WAY-FM out of Nashville, is a great example of both timing and trust – both in his on-air performance and in our coaching relationship. No one makes me laugh like Wally, and he’s an “idea fountain”.

Recently, a station manager brought me aboard to work with a new air talent that had just come to the station. Even though the new guy done a couple of sessions with me a year or two ago, he’s still afraid of being coached. The boss told me the guy’s exact words were that “He doesn’t want someone coming along trying to make him sound like everyone else.”

Well, first of all, that’s not what I do. Yes, I have some basic principles that have been proven to work over the course of coaching over 350 stations in all formats. But a lot of times, a talent will harbor this fear of making changes simply because (1) he didn’t work with a good coach, (2) he thinks he knows all he needs to know, and/or (3) he associates the “bits” he does with BEING his identity.

So in case you’re approached with working with a talent coach (and there are only about three that deserve to be called that), I’m going to lay out my 3 Steps of coaching over the course of the next few tips.

Step 1:
Correcting bad habits, and “weeding the garden”.

A lot of things that people are taught nowadays are wrong, because the person telling them they’re good heard the copy of the copy of the copy of the original, and have no idea what the Strategy behind certain techniques actually was at the point of origin. For example, I heard dozens of stations try to copy KVIL in Dallas when morning man Ron Chapman was King of the Hill, but what worked for KVIL wouldn’t work anywhere else, because they were aimed at a specific target audience unique to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.

So we start with what Strategy is, as opposed to just Tactics. And as a natural offshoot of that, I remove all the typical deejay “crutches” that most talents don’t even realize they have, like always saying “the basics” in the same order, doing the ridiculous double time checks, ending with your name or the station’s name into commercials, always starting Content breaks by talking about yourself first, etc. etc. etc.

This takes a while, just like an actor with a briefcase full of great reviews from when he played Hamlet at the “Grazing Trough Dinner Theater” needs a little time to put that stuff aside when he gets into the Actors Studio.

A very good talent I work with did a contest the other day, and had a great winner, who was really surprised and happy about winning lunch for her office from a local deli. He did a good job with her in the winner call he played on the air, but at the end, he added a whole bunch of “blah blah blah” about the specific hoops the winner had to jump through to get her prize, and along the way, he mentioned the name of a person in the office that no listener would know or care about.

This is what I sent him in his coaching session recap:

Here’s how it should have unfolded: Right after you told her she had won lunch, compliments of Jackson Street Deli and she said, “I can do that,” you said “Sweet.”
GO!! Right there! No person listening needs to hear the inner mechanics of how you get the prize.

Anytime you end with a “left brain” thought, you suck the wind out of that moment of winning. You can do the other stuff off the air.

By the way, I’d also wait to do the “next time we’ll play” plug until the NEXT break, not glomp it onto the end of the winner call. CELEBRATE THE WIN, then GO.

This “never end with the ‘left brain’” thing applies to everything you do. When you revert to data, numbers, times, etc. at the end, you’re just a buzz kill.